The arts column: paper chase

Rupert Christiansen

12:01AM GMT 17 Mar 2004

Rupert Christiansen wonders what happened to the death of the book

Our backroom planners, bless them, have made several awful boobs over the past 30 years. (Don't mention the M25.) But few of their bum steers have proved as embarrassingly wrong as the prophecy that the decline of printed paper was nigh, and that in the 21st century all our reading would be online.

The book, they said, was dead - an example of outmoded Renaissance technology - and journals and newspapers would be far more efficiently presented and preserved in a brave new world of instantly interactive microchips.

In 2004, the prospect is different. When the dotcom bubble burst, the potential of cyberspace civilisation came to seem finite. We may like to communicate online, but we don't want to read there, at least not in a leisurely or reflective way. The book has sustained its position as one of the most flexible, durable and efficient of human inventions.

Paper still dominates our lives, and the amount of printed matter has increased by something like 50 per cent over the past decade. This is a disaster for the great copyright libraries. Having operated on the assumption that computer terminals rather than shelves would be needed, they are bursting at the seams.

Take the British Library, for instance. Its new premises at St Pancras are a huge success with readers, who have come to enjoy and expect high standards of service. These are unlikely to continue. Because cost-cutting and misjudged forecasts left the building (which opened in 1998) only half the size originally planned in the 1970s, its storage areas will be full by 2006.

There is small chance that the BL will be able to expand on to the three acres it owns at the rear of the site, because developing such valuable property for storage makes no economic sense. So where can the BL find the eight new miles of shelving it unexpectedly requires for printed matter every year? Only off-site, with the result that more material will take longer to reach readers.

Some of the overflow is already held in warehouses spread across London. These are sub-standard in terms of temperature control and conservation. The most pressing problem is the BL's Newspaper Library at Colindale, near Hendon. It simply cannot handle the number of visitors it receives nor the inexorable decay of highly acidic newsprint.

Microfilming is one solution, digitisation another. But these are slow and expensive processes, and readers and scholars insist on working from the real thing rather than inauthentic replicas.

Space at Colindale is at a premium. A few years ago, an attempt to chuck out a few duplicate runs of peripheral titles was aborted after whistle-blowing by American novelist Nicholson Baker. But today's newspapers are fatter than ever: how many supplements, how many daily editions do you preserve?

It might seem simpler just to keep the online versions, but how do you track their hour-by-hour alterations? And, just for safety, shouldn't you also print out some hard copy? Such questions are repeatedly debated at librarians' conferences, without clear conclusion.

The result is that the strategic future for the BL lies not in St Pancras, but in Boston Spa, between York and Leeds. This ugly, sprawling but bustling site covers 60 acres and employs 1,300 people, 500 more than St Pancras. It is about to be expanded with a new building offering 100 miles of shelving - about a decade's worth of printed acquisitions, at current rates - which will make it bigger than St Pancras.

Formerly an ordnance factory (with the advantage of walls that would explode vertically rather than horizontally), this site opened in 1962. Since then, it has been used as the BL's ultimate dumping ground, containing all manner of secondary, duplicated and foreign materials, 280,000 journals and 450,000 conference proceedings. Latterly, it has also functioned as the hub of the BL's electronic delivery facilities.

Its systems are a mixture of creaking Heath Robinson contraptions and computerised wizardry, but they work brilliantly. Manned 24 hours a day, Boston Spa processes four million requests a year at astonishing speed. (After the Bali bombing, an Australian hospital needed a paper on burns. At 3am, Boston Spa found and scanned it within 20 minutes.)

But this class of service does not come cheap. The pressure on our copyright libraries is immense, and government is reluctant to commit the money required to relieve it.

The BL has been taken by surprise by the need to deal with a booming paper culture, as well as the novelty of electronic information storage and transmission. It copes manfully, but it has become clear that St Pancras is a major miscalculation which has failed in its aims of centralising the collections and meeting the demands of the next century.